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JOHN REILLY: 1980s band was, like, totally gnarly dude

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By The Front Page

Here’s the place to join the conversation about the hottest topics on the South Shore. Talk with editors, reporters and readers of The Patriot Ledger, the hometown newspaper of Quincy, Mass., since 1837. Think of this as your backstage pass to our
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Here’s the place to join the conversation about the hottest topics on the South Shore. Talk with editors, reporters and readers of The Patriot Ledger, the hometown newspaper of Quincy, Mass., since 1837. Think of this as your backstage pass to our newsroom.

On Friday night I discovered that you don’t necessarily need a sleek, silver, highly customized DeLorean retrofitted with a portable plutonium-powered nuclear reactor to travel back in time.
These days it takes a lot for me to disregard my 9:00pm bedtime and boldly venture out where the zombies and vampires and teenagers roam. But the day after Thanksgiving, Showcase Live in Patriots Place played host to Rubix Kube, a unique and high-energy 1980s tribute band that my wife and I had unintentionally stumbled across at a reunion party over the summer. We enjoyed that night so much that this time we organized a large group of friends, old and new, and through the band, re-introduced ourselves to all the things that we used to love about the eighties.
“We genuinely love the songs and the music,” said Cherie Martorana, the female lead singer of the band. “And I think this comes across to those who attend our shows. We have so much fun and we never, ever get sick of the songs. This music, and this band – it keeps us young.”
Cherie Martorana is a Reading High School graduate who was discovered almost accidentally at a dive karaoke bar in New York City. When the startup band asked her to join, she jumped at the opportunity.
“Scott Lovelady was the lead singer in the band and he was looking to fill-in for a member who was pregnant,” she said. “The first thing I did was make them all start wearing vintage clothes.”
And before you knew it, a night out to listen to a local tribute band became a Marty McFly-like time travel back to the future.
“We really wanted people to have a true 80s experience,” Cherie said. “We want to perform every genre, cover every great song and we want make the original artists proud. That is important to us. We want to get into character and stick as close as possible to the original. We want to take you on a nostalgia trip. While you are here, we want you to live the eighties.”
Whatever they are doing up there, it works. With a night-long 1980s pop culture video collage as a backdrop, the band used dozens of costume changes over the course of just a few hours to instantly transform into Bon Jovi or Devo or Madonna or Michael Jackson. They cover every song so close to the original that, at times, you wonder if you are listening to the original. But the musicians take great pride in the fact that it is all live music. They use no pre-recorded tracks and they perform songs that you can not only dance to, but sing-along with as well.
“It’s a night long energy swap,” Cherie said. “We feed off the energy of the audience and try and offer that same level of energy back to them with our music. And because we really, truly love the songs, the power of the music is real. And people believe it.”
By generational circumstance, the eighties were put in a no-win situation. Like the next Patriot quarterback who follows future Hall-of-Famer Tom Brady, the eighties had the epochal misfortune of following the idealism of the sixties and the social consciousness of the 70s. How could they possibly stand apart?
And when you live through the era, when all your formative years are spent there, I don’t think you necessarily notice what is unique and distinctive about the time. In the moment, I don’t think you take note of the things that will last. And while I certainly wouldn’t describe the eighties as the most elegant (shoulder pads and bad prints) or the most culturally iconic (ALF and The Brat Pack) of decades, for me the music was, if not remarkable, at least memorable. And for one night shared with friends both old and new; past and present, Rubix Kube helped me rewind the radio dial and remember those days.
And here’s the thing. My theory is that the music that has the biggest impact on your life, the music that influences you the most – is the music that crosses your life at a point in time when you are most impressionable. When you are young and independent and indestructible. It is the music that relates to the best time and the best moments and the most important people in your life. For me, and for Cherie Martorana and the members of the wonderful band Rubix Kube, that was the 1980s. And I think that is why I enjoy this band so much. This music brings me back to those days. And I just can’t wait for the next time.
Now if I could just find my damn legwarmers.